


One Day, You Will Find Me

by The_Exile



Category: Contact, Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-07
Updated: 2012-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-30 18:32:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Earthbound, a while before Contact. Sort of a sequel to 'Through a Lens'and prequel to my other fic 'I Miss You'. An Earthbound player called Terry is psychically awakened. He just wants to escape from the planet that is increasingly his prison, but he is in great danger, as is planet Earth. Ultimately, he must make the decision what to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Day, You Will Find Me

Terry knew what was coming when he first fell through the world.

He had been taking his usual afternoon walk in the park. These days, he liked quiet and solitude. It wasn't that he disliked people, he just didn't really feel like he and other people had much to say to each other any more. He mostly just stared at the sky and the grass, and watched a dog run in wide circles around the green expanse. From his vantage point in the middle of the field, he could see the cityscape expand in one direction and nothing but trees in the other. His walks become increasingly long and aimless. He didn't keep track of things like time and distance any more. As he walked, happy to just let one foot go in front of the other and see where it led him, he hummed 'Smiles and Tears'. 

It all felt like it was about to end. Not in a suicidal way. That would have made him start singing 'A Bad Dream'. Not even like the Apocalypse. There wouldn't be that much fuss. It was just going to end. The final curtain was going to descend, the actors were going to come together for a final bow, the orchestra would be playing as the lights dimmed. He had been told it was natural to have such thoughts and sensations after coming so close to death, and that there was a counsellor at his local GP if he needed someone to talk to, and sometimes they asked him if he had experienced God, which annoyed the crap out of him. He hated the attitude that there were only certain stories you could think of as really really important. All stories had power. Everyone's story was different. They were equally real. 

He had reached the middle of the field when he sank through the ground. It wasn't like stepping in mud; his foot went straight through, with no resistance, like passing through a cunningly placed hologram of a patch of grass. Only one foot went through before he jerked it back, crying out, afraid that he was going to plummet straight through the world into some kind of eternal abyss. Then he found out that he wasn't very good at standing on one foot. He flailed his arms but failed to stop himself falling over altogether. There was a crackling static noise, like putting your hand too close to an old monitor that was turned on, but all over his body, and suddenly the song he had been singing was inside him instead of outside. He curled up into a tight ball. He could feel everything in so much detail; the fresh springy texture of the grass, the damp and the smell, the roaring in his head as though something was trying to escape from it, the background hum of the planet as it casually maintained itself. It was like he had never managed to get that close to the Earth before, although he fell over in fields as often as anyone else. As if he could reach out and touch something he couldn't, before.

Spotting his collapse, the dog ran over to sniff at him and lick his face. It inserted its nose into his ear, a surefire cure for sudden human malfunction.

“Okay desu ka?” it whispered.

He nodded, and quietly added, “I miss you.”

Suddenly, the dog whined, shook itself as if trying to rid itself of an unpleasant sensation, then ran off, yelping.

His foot didn't hurt as much as he would have expected it to but he still thought he'd better go home. 

I miss you,he repeated to the darkness.

* * *

He lay upside down on the bed and watched the computer screen. He could read the text perfectly clearly from this angle, and anyway, he was only playing music and watching the visualiser as it painted psychedelic swirls over his screen, lagging a few seconds behind the track it was supposed to synchronise with. 

Usually the music helped him to sleep. He slept when he was tired or needed to heal, regardless of the time of day. Heavy duty window blinds and lots of blankets prevented the outside world from interfering with this. He knew something was wrong with him. However, he couldn't sleep. The wrongness was getting worse. Every time he looked around him, the walls seemed closer together than they were last time. The music was just amplifying it. It was supposed to distract him from the problem, but instead it reminded him of it. Maybe he was just growing bored of that playlist, or maybe it was the fact that he could hear the background hum, a noise that wasn't the heating or the lighting or the plumbing, every time there was a quiet part

It felt as though his head was going to explode. Not from pain. It was something else. An anticipation that wasn't going anywhere. A potential that couldn't be released. Roaring red static flooded his vision and filled his hearing with white noise, pressing against his skull as though his head could burst at any moment.

“I MISS YOU!” he screamed, a shrill shriek of rage and emptiness and homesickness as intense as the dreams of every exile wandering the planet. The red static erupted from him, billowing out in billowing clouds that danced and sparked with a life of their own, like the visualiser on the screen. The power built up until he could feel it in every part of his body, as though the static was now a thing outside of him, a sea that he was swimming through. Two discordant musical notes sounded and he felt himself being thrown from side to side by them, then he collapsed in a heap on the bed in a cold sweat, trying desperately to control his breathing. 

He did sleep then, his energy spent, but he was woken up ten minutes later by an annoying knock on the door. At first it wasn't that annoying, just as though someone was trying to drum a popular tune, then it suddenly changed rhythm before becoming a frantic banging that made him worry that the idiot was going to break his front door down. He sighed, emerged from the covers and ran downstairs to open the door. He didn't know why anyone would be knocking on the door without warning, or indeed, at all. He stuck his head out of the window. He had read somewhere that if debt collectors came round, they weren't legally allowed to enter your house unless you left a door or window open for them. Debt collectors couldn't fly, and he could quickly close and lock the window or drop the bedside cabinet on their head from a great height. He didn't owe any money but you never knew when a bailiff might get the wrong address and repossess the wrong person's stuff.

There was nobody outside. He blinked, shook his head and ran downstairs. Maybe the door wasn't locked properly. He opened the door and was about to slam it shut again, just to make sure it was firmly shut. Then it occurred to him to wander into the street, to see if the person who had left the note had gone off looking for him. If he had missed them, he had to catch up, otherwise he might not see them again. It was a weird night, and weird nights didn't always happen. The sort of thing that happened on weird nights might never happen the same way again.

It had grown dark and there was nobody at all on the street, only a car rushing past and the same old lady who always stood at the bus stop at this time of night. It was a clear sky and the stars were out, a screensaver in the sky, except that the sky wasn't resting, whatever anyone thought, he could feel the countless celestial processes running tirelessly to keep the Universe ticking over. The billions of worlds, all of them homes.

Wordlessly, he ran down the road to the park. It was like being a kid again, sneaking out while his parents were asleep. He had never really done those things when he was a kid, and if there were any 'parents' watching him now, they were probably the kind you couldn't run or hide from.

He didn't stop running until he reached the place where he could see the entire town. It was kind of pretty at night; the forest of twinkling lights, the muted buzz of nocturnal human life, the warm glow around the edges of the sky. That was when he found out that the skyline had changed. Between the street lights and the horizon, the furthest distance he could see, there was a thin white spire. It was too jagged to be a tower block. It was like a mountain peak. A mountain peak that had appeared from nowhere overnight.

There was no way for him to recognise it from this distance, even if he had ever seen what it really looked like up close, but he somehow did. It sang its presence to him, put the information into his head as though it had also always been there, just part of the map.

I've got to find a wide open space, he thought, with a decent run-up. Holding his arms out, he ran forwards, jumped up the bank and into the field. Once he reached the middle of the field, he took a sharp right turn and then began running around and around in increasingly large circles. I've got to time this right, he thought, or it won't work. It really was like a children's game. He felt an urge to burst out laughing. The wind rushed through his hair. No, that roaring, surging force was too loud and ferocious to be the wind...

It grew darker. The circles became wider as he sped up.

* * *

Hungry flames washed over the scientist. For a second, Brick Road worried that things had not gone quite according to plan for his colleague, and the unfortunate man had been immolated. Then there was a 'FZAP' noise as the flames dissipated harmlessly off a psychic shield. Dr. Andonuts pressed a button just as the shield fragmented into hexagons of rainbow light, shattered by the force of the psionic attack. The machine beeped and generated a fresh shield. His assailant screamed, babbling a stream of incoherent words, then the machine on his head (it looked just a little like a colander) glowed red and another gout of fire engulfed the scientist. 

Dr Andonuts swore. The light on top of the shield generator had suddenly started flashing red, and the machine was beeping frantically at him. The shield flickered off for a second, allowing a tendril of flame to flare inches away from his beard. He could smell burning hair.

“GET IT OFF ME!” he screamed. There was a satisfying thud, then an outraged bellow followed by silence, as Brick Road jumped out from around the corner and smacked the insane psychic over the back of the head with a sign post. He collapsed like a sack of unhinged, telekinetically gifted potatoes. 

“What kept you? You're supposed to be helping me, not mapping the dungeon!”

“But its a really interesting layout, and I thought you said you'd got that machine working now,” he yawned and placed his notepad and pen back in his overalls pocket.

“It IS working, it just ran out of batteries faster than I expected,” he said, “Its supposed to flash amber when its halfway drained, then red when its a quarter full, then start beeping when its about to run out entirely. But it... well, it decided not to do that today.” He swore again and thumped it on the wall of the volcanic cavern, “Stupid lousy battery life on these things... not using Zexonyte again...”

“Maybe we should go back for now,” suggested the third member of their expedition team, Apple Kid. As their newest recruit, he was carrying all the equipment. It was heavy, but it meant he was allowed to stay out of fights. Dr. Andonuts didn't want him ruining the delicate apparatus.

“We don't have enough data samples yet!” protested the scientist, “I'm sure we're getting a pattern... we just need a few more samples before we can see anything conclusive.”

“How many more of those things do we have to go near? We're going to get ourselves killed!”

“They're not 'things', they're people, and they can be cured,” said the scientist, “We just need to know what's causing them to go like this.”

At first, they had naturally assumed it was Giygas' influence that was causing phenomenon referred to colloquially as 'Major Psychic Psychos' – the unstable psychics living in the caverns of the Lost Underworld. When Giygas invaded, humans and animals suddenly going insane and turning hostile was fairly commonplace. Spontaneous psychic phenomena such as objects becoming telekinetically charged and attacking people were reported and it wasn't difficult to link the two together, that human psychics could lose control of their powers. They were probably teleporting to the Fire Cavern under direct manipulation by Giygas, to guard the Fire Cavern. However, Giygas had been destroyed and the psychics of the Lost Underworld still weren't back to normal. It was possible that their minds had simply taken too much damage to be repaired, that they had too much psychic power for their minds to control and hadn't been all that sane to begin with. It was Paula who had commissioned him to go back to the Lost Underworld. She wanted to try and use her healing powers to help them. She wasn't that good at healing minds – they worked too differently to bodies, and were much more complicated – but she might be able to do at least some good, or at least work out what was happening to them. 

The odd thing about them was that nobody knew who they were before they became Major Psychic Psychos. The Government, who normally kept psychics under surveillance (if someone could teleport and you didn't keep tabs on them at all times, you'd never get them to pay their taxes), held no record of their existence. That many people at once didn't just disappear. There was another thing that made Dr. Andonuts suspicious of them; they still kept teleporting to the Fire Cavern, even though there was nothing really there for them any more. Through careful observation of their migration patterns, as well as monitoring the strength of their psychic activity in different regions, Dr. Andonuts had worked out that they were gravitating towards the Horn of Time.

“Something's up there,” he told his colleagues, pointing out over the cliff ledge to the strange piece of land that seemed to jut out from nowhere, a tiny island in a nonexistent sea, looking for all the world as though if some creator God had put it in the wrong place, or was still working on that area of the world and didn't really want them snooping around his unfinished work. Nobody in the team liked being there except Dr. Andonuts, who found it fascinating.

“Well, the time stream won't be completely back to normal yet. Maybe Giygas...”

He shook his head, “Not Giygas. There'd still be problems cropping up all the place if Giygas was anything but completely erased.”

“Pokey? Ness did say something about him...”

“About him being in Onett. Which means, he's not in there now. Something's in there now,” he insisted.

“Its a shame the Phase Distorter doesn't work, hm? Or we could actually go back there,” said Brick Road.

“It would be interesting to go there even if there isn't an emergency. It never occurred to me to analyse the area before. Such an unusual place, and I don't have any clue at all what the Horn of Time even is...” said Dr. Andonuts, “... Wait, are you criticising my inventions again?”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” said Brick Road, with an absolutely straight face.

The scientist sighed, “Look, I've already apologised about the Dungeon Man thing... the next version will be able to fit through tight spaces, I swear...”

“And I told you I'm not letting you test anything else on me, ever again,” he said, “And furthermore, I think this expedition is completely pointless...”

Suddenly, the ground began to shake. The roaring sound was louder than two Chomposaurs, which Brick Road knew because they had found two Chomposaurs that had survived Giygas' death earlier on that morning, and entirely failed to sneak past them because Dr. Andonuts' labcoat began beeping.

“Everyone to the Sky Runner!” yelled the scientist. Brick Road helped Apple Kid back to his feet. Falling rocks were pelting him. 

“Its doing that thing again!” Apple Kid pointed out. The Sky Runner's support legs had been knocked out from under it and it was rolling over and over, back and forth. Brick Road shook his head and ran to grab one end of it while Apple Kid grabbed the other. The scientist fumbled in his pockets for the keys. Suddenly, he stopped and stared out at the scene behind him. 

A jagged white spire was rising up from out of the ground. It was slowly filling the space around the Horn of Time.

“What's going on?” demanded Apple Kid.

“That's odd,” muttered the scientist.

“Well, of course its odd! A mountain just appeared from nowhere!” yelled Brick Road.

“I know that. I mean, I recognise that mountain,” he said, “I haven't been there in years. It certainly shouldn't be down here!”

“Where is it supposed to be, then?”

“That's Mount Itoi,” he said.

“Oh,” he said, “Didn't something happen up there about ten years ago?”

He nodded, “I was part of it.”

“Any idea what its supposed to mean? It just being here like this?”

“It means its not over,” he said, and ran in the other direction, towards the mountain.

* * *

The air was bitterly cold. Terry hugged himself and tried to concentrate on enduring the chill wind but it stabbed straight through his defences, like an assassin's stiletto blade. He sung a song to help his concentration, and wished he had thought to put something warmer on than the black jeans and short-sleeved shirt he wore around the house, seeing as how the tops of mountains were usually cold, but he didn't really know enough about mountains to think of that sort of thing automatically, and anyway, you don't think ahead when you have sudden rapturous epiphanies.

He looked up ahead. The peak of Mount Itoi ended abruptly in a twisted spire that looked like the top of an ice cream cone. It was difficult to see where he was going now. The pain of the cold was making his vision break up and occasionally flash red. 

 

You've done well to get this far, said a voice in his head. It made him jump. It wasn't pleasant, to have someone else's voice in your head without your permission. He always had his own voice in his head, to help him remember things and go over what he was doing, and he sometimes remembered what other people had said as though their voices were literally recorded in his head. He assumed that was the case for everyone. This was different. It was like someone trying to talk to you while you were asleep, so that their voice went into your dream and was disembodied, coming from somewhere outside the world, a harsh contrast and an unwelcome interruption.

You're almost home, now. Just a few more steps. 

“Who are you?” he whispered. As he did so, the red light filled his vision completely. All he could see was the outline of another person walking towards him. It was himself. His exact same appearance, posture and way of walking. It was like watching himself in a mirror, except a mirror that was made of red tinted glass, badly out of focus and with a mildly horrified expression frozen on its face as it examined him, as though it was the one watching something that was meant to destroy its sanity, not himself. It sounded too sane to be Giygas but too powerful to be Giegue. It might have been Porky, but he didn't think the glorified school bully had that subtle an imagination.

I'm someone who needs your help. I've been waiting a long time for someone like you. Someone with enough power and enough awareness to make the journey you are making. But you can't make the final journey on your own. You only got here because its closer. Its on the very edge of the place where your world meets the closest world to it. I can give you a helping hand. But you have to do something in return. You have to let me go through the other way.

“Its not my world. What would you want to go to that crappy world for, anyway?” Terry asked, instantly suspicious, “You said for yourself its hell to get out of again.”

Its like that because its broken. You can't live in a world that's broken. You work properly. I'm broken, possibly even more broken than that world. 

“Why'd you want to go and get more broken, then? Nobody here will fix you.”

That world won't break me. I'll break it.

“Do you plan on breaking a lot of worlds, then?”

You want your revenge, don't you? For being stuck there, looking out at other worlds from your barred window. 

“Not really. I just want to go home,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets.

If you're worried about the people in the world, the broken world I make will probably be better than the one I overwrite in the process. I mean, it can't get worse than their world. You never know, my being there might even fix the problem. Which one do you honestly think is worse, me or the world you've just escaped from?

He shrugged, “You have a point. Bad endings are scary, but its better than there being no story at all.”

I'm not going to trick you. Its just a fair exchange. Nobody else is going to help you go home but me. Even if there's anyone who can hear you call out to them, you won't be able to pull that trick again. Your power will be weaker now you're up close. You're already too involved in the world. You probably already have a proper destiny decided for you.

He shrugged, “I was prepared for that. It'll be a relief, to have a real purpose instead of making one up, and pretending to be free to make choices, when really you're only allowed to make them because nothing you do makes the slightest bit of difference to the Universe.”

So, you're prepared to do it?

“I have no idea how I'm supposed to, but...”

Just open your mind to me, and keep on walking. There's a cave up ahead. You know where it is. You know where to go.

He shrugged and did as he was asked, putting one foot after the other, walking forwards in a straight line, half wondering if he really was making progress or if the world was just pretending to move closer to him, like in those dreams where he was building up to something but always woke up just before he got there, probably because his imagination couldn't quite picture what a true ending would be like. But that kind of thing was going to change, soon, he told himself. Sure enough, the cave mouth was in front of him, and it was growing mercifully warmer and darker already.

* * *

Sensors and dials on all of Dr. Andonuts' machines went haywire. Needles oscillated wildly from one extreme to the other. A machine that went 'beep' produced a continuous high-pitched drone for five minutes, then fell silent forever. Smoke started billowing out of one device that he thought he had paradox-proofed so he could fasten it to the outer hull of the Phase Distorter.

Individually, those machines had each broken down at least three times this week. They had never, ever all broken down together. He knew he had stepped into another world. 

He was filled with regret and shame that he had never really tried to reach other worlds before. The Sky Runner was just a glorified helicopter. Even the Phase Distorter, a machine for travelling freely through space and time, was only designed to go to other places and times within this world, places he already knew existed and could easily imagine. It had only reached Giygas' dimension because the evil entity had influenced their world for long enough that he could program his machine to trace his path. But other worlds existed. Giygas and the Starmen had already travelled from one world to the other – from their own world to his. He had known that it was possible, but he hadn't pursued it yet. It was cowardly, and wasn't in the spirit of scientific enquiry. 

Now he had a chance to experience another world for himself. It probably wasn't going to be a very pleasant world. It had Mount Itoi in it, and the mountain still felt as wrong as it did when he fought Giegue on top of it. If he wanted to pick which world he ended up on, he should have taken the initiative and gone there himself instead of waiting for it to come to him.

Maybe that was what the crazy psychics were all doing back there, he thought, leaving the world. Or maybe they're just all sensitive to places where the different worlds overlap. Seeing something like that in your mind every day is enough to drive everyone a little crazy. He was an experienced enough scientist to know that seeing how things really were could do worse things to your brain than seeing things that weren't there.

He finished calming down all his machines, then pressed on up the mountain path. He was near the peak, on the opposite side to the cave mouth. The wind was making his labcoat flap about, threatening to pull him off the edge of the cliff. It reminded him of his first visit, when he was a child about the same age as his son was now, battling against a force that threatened the entire world. He hoped he wouldn't have to do that again. He was too old. He should have taken Apple Kid and Brick Road with him. No, that would have been unfair, even for him. They had already started to run, and this was his own problem. 

* * *

“Take a melody, simple as can be. No, wait, that's not how it went...” he muttered to himself, his breath condensing instantly in the cold air.

 

Inside the cave it was pitch dark. He walked into walls, fell over and scraped his knees before he decided to be sensible and go slowly, reaching out his arms to feel where the walls were. It was surprisingly dry for a cave. As he walked through tunnels he had no way to measure, for a length of time he had no way to count, the voice guided him. The other presence walked by his side like his shadow, never visible when he turned around but always uncomfortably close.

Now, pretend this is a dream. A lucid dream. You've had those before, yes? Except you know you can't control it for much longer and that you're going to wake up soon. So you've got to get everything done before that happens. And when you do wake up, you have to wake up slowly, so the doors don't close right away and there's a long time between sleeping and waking. 

“How do I make sure none of this world gets into Eagleland?”

You can't avoid bringing some of this world with you. You've got part of this world inside of you, your memories, the influence of the people there. You have to trust that you won't let them change Eagleland, that you'll let Eagleland change you. Now, do you know where you are?

He shook his head. He was entirely lost. In the daze of fatigue and confusion, he had completely failed to keep track of how many turnings he had taken, and all those other things you were supposed to know when you were wandering around a dark cave. If the presence decided to just abandon him here, he would probably starve to death. Maybe he would get to hear 'A Bad Dream' playing in the background.

Good. You're not supposed to know where you're going, or what time is it. You have to decide for yourself that you're going to be in Eagleland when you turn the next corner. There'll be a light at the end of the tunnel, and when you walk out...

“The sun will just be rising, and that music will play when you first go to Onett,” he finished, before adding, “I hate early mornings.” 

But remember what I told you. Leave the door open for me. 

“Right,” he said, reaching a hand out to steady himself. He felt faint, as though his body had only just realised he had been walking for hours.

He had promised to leave the door open behind him when he went to Eagleland. He hadn't promised to go to Eagleland. Or to use the door. Anywhere that wasn't Earth was better than Earth. He was sure he could find Eagleland again somehow, wherever he ended up. Whatever happened. 

He threw his head back and spread out his arms. They clipped straight through the walls. It didn't hurt this time, because he was doing this the wrong way, and it was bound to go a bit wrong. Maybe he was a bit wrong in himself, from the perspective of the world. He let go entirely, and fell through the world.

* * *

Dr. Andonuts woke up to find himself lying on a sandy beach. The tide was coming in, and his labcoat was already drenched.

He had no idea how long he had been unconscious for. The last thing he remembered was that he had circled the mountain peak and had been about to reach the cave entrance. He had heard a boy's voice muttering to someone, but he couldn't hear anyone else. He could have imagined it, he supposed; the wind had been pretty noisy. Then there had been a bright light, too bright, that overwhelmed his mind. It was like the time Ness had been using PK Flash on the monsters outside the laboratory and Dr. Andonuts had walked out at the wrong moment and been caught inside it. That didn't explain what he was doing here. If an enemy attacked him, they would have killed or captured him, not randomly flung him here.

He stood up and tried to brush the wet sand off his labcoat. The bulk of it crumbled away but he was still filthy. His machines were probably ruined. He needed to go back to his laboratory and maybe even have a shower, but he had no idea where he was. It was quiet and nobody was charging him an exorbitant amount of money just for lying there, so it couldn't have been Summers. 

Still, it didn't matter. He would find out where he was soon enough. If there was nobody around to tell him, he would find new equipment, or build some. Given enough time, a genius inventor could build anything he wanted to from even the most basic of materials. Besides, he needed a lot of time to work out what exactly had happened up there on Mount Itoi. He couldn't go back empty-handed and embarrass himself in front of Brick Road. If it was a threat to Eagleland, he needed to be able to explain clearly what was about to happen, and build some machine to defend the planet with. His son would need to know, and no doubt he would tell the other three.

He put his hands in his pockets and wandered along the shore. He could hear a dog barking.


End file.
